


Burning Like Fire (A Shadow On Your Wall)

by Glinda



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Community: whoniverse1000, F/F, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-22
Updated: 2008-05-22
Packaged: 2017-10-07 05:08:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The making of memories and the passage of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Like Fire (A Shadow On Your Wall)

She's been to dozens of different planets and as many different time zones, but she thinks that Earth in the mid 1960s is her favourite. It's the feeling of potential that she loves so dearly. The feel of her own species slowly waking up to the vastness of the universe, the young people so alive with the chance to change their world and touch the stars. Her history lessons tell her that so many of their dreams will fall to dust and ashes, those dreamers living the hypocrisies they rebelled so hard against. The stars will remain mostly out of reach even in her own time. Yet. Still she encourages the Doctor's returns to this time period. Over and over again, dashing about madly through alien invasions in contemporary fashions. She finds herself unable to regret allowing the Doctor and Jamie to wander off to investigate the mystery on their own.

Isobel's camera is so archaic to her eyes, making her long to take it apart and make it work better. Instead, she vamps and poses for Isobel's delight. The other girl throwing herself around the room carelessly in her search for the perfect photograph. She's had her photo taken several times but never like this. All stiff formal official things, for identification and practical purposes, never for 'fun'. Never for anything as sentimental as memories. It makes her wonder about life in her own time, on the ground beneath her ever-spinning home. Were people laughing and dancing and spinning, capturing love and joy and passion?

She is distracted by long legs that seem to go on forever. Trying different combinations of outfits on for different poses and different angles, 'like kids playing dress-up' as Isobel laughingly describes them and Zoë laughs along, even though she never did. The hemlines get higher and the necklines lower till they're both chasing about in outfits so small that in a former life Zoë would have felt under-dressed for bed. The heels that accompany the outfit are ridiculously high, so when she trips over a rejected outfit, the chances of her getting back up again are slim to none. Isobel merely laughs at her predicament, taking advantage of it to capture some increasingly risqué photographs, until she runs out of film and Zoë drags her down to the floor with her to explore and memorise each other in an altogether more risqué fashion.

Lying among the mess of clothes scattered across the floor like a lumpy blanket Isobel whispers nonsense against Zoë's skin. Romantic things about truth and freedom and beauty. Photographic terminology flowing across soft lips as easily as equations flit across Zoë's mind as incomprehensible to her way of thinking as those equations are to Isobel's. They aren't all sweet nothings though, there are questions tripping off Isobel's tongue about who she really is and where she's from. The urge to tell the truth is overwhelming though she doesn't know where to begin, so she starts with a back to front description of a world where little girls play logic puzzles instead of dress-up and falls asleep dreaming of a time when the different childhoods they represent won't be mutually exclusive. Isobel listens and asks questions, sometimes pointless sometimes pertinent, but she does not fail to believe in this other Earth of Zoë's memories. This is, after all, a time when anything seems possible.

After, when the invasion is all over and UNIT are busy with the clean-up operation, Isobel takes her to a photography exhibition. Isobel talks of consequences and the importance of keeping records of the terrible things that happen, their necessity for allowing repair and healing. Zoë read about the wars of the twentieth century as a child, all the facts and figures are just a thought away if she wants them but the photos on the walls do not correspond with the cold logic of the knowledge in her head. The photos show suffering and bravery, things which cannot be quantified and analysed. She understands what Isobel meant before, about trying to capture the essence of who she was. This is the difference between the photos of her own time and of this time. Isobel's striving to capture the essence of the time, the place, the people, seeking to understand and explain, rather than catalogue and fix. The scientist in her understands the vital role splitting the atom has had in shaping and making possible the world she was born into, but the image of the shadow on the wall that was once a person makes her wonder if it was worth the price paid. In her head she knows the chemical properties of napalm and its applications in warfare, but she cannot wrap her mind around the image of a young girl on fire, yet running for her life captured forever, a moment of terror and pain frozen in time. She doesn't realise she's crying till she feels Isobel's hand in her own, solid and real in the face of so much that she doesn't understand. All the horrors and destruction she has seen and will see do not compare with these images, these horrors seem more real, less fantastical, distance she decides only serves to make things more terrible. This is what she is, what they are to the people they meet on their travels, just one of many shadows burned into their memories of a terrible time, fleeting, ephemeral and ultimately forgotten. Even when all else of her travels has been erased, she remembers the stillness of the room, the crisp black and white of the photos, the feel of Isobel's hand in her own and her breath on her cheek as she whispered about the importance of not forgetting. The memory of a stolen kiss burnt into her memory as surely as the shadow on the wall.


End file.
